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Memories of the 28th Century

Minding Business

I sometimes find myself wondering why someone isn’t minding his or her own business. And I usually to do that, but The Valley Advocate got me to do otherwise. This preference hasn’t shown up in my blog often, but blogs are for people to vent their opinions. The Feature Article in the paper was about physician assisted suicide, which is an excellent example of people taking responsibility for themselves. Then when I opened the paper the first heading I saw was an opinion piece about “healthy food program for low income people”, which is an excellent example of someone trying to tell others how to live their lives.
Then I got to Letters to the Editor. The first one was titled “It’s time to create cruelty free circuses”. Which probably is by someone who isn’t a professional handler of animals suggesting how professional animal handlers in a profession that has existed for thousands of years should do their jobs.
The next one was “Longing for a cleaner world”, which is against littering.
I can’t expect much else from something named the Advocate, and I just grabbed it to do the crossword puzzle while I was eating.
It’s one thing to suggest something for others to approve, but the potential legislation about suicide would overturn centuries of individuals being forced to act in by the rules of others, even when they did not want to do. As humans often say, "Don’t judge others" is a common phrase.
But standards of behavior are culturally determined. For that reasons, homogeneous societies tend to be happier and to have less controversy in them.
Then there’s the matter of cultural imperialism in contrast to physical conquest. The recent migrants from Africa and Asia into Europe are trying to overturn the current culture without physically conquering until later. They will try to have a political takeover after they have supplanted the culture, and Europe is so dedicated to the ideals of classical liberalism that there isn't very much opposition to the cultural conquest, even though it has already had unpleasant effects. I wonder if those migrants realize that the European culture is the reason why they are going there instead of staying home.

I am generally opposed to people telling others how to live their lives largely because no one knows what it is like to be someone else, and humans are not identical. Individuals act, in many ways, as their sub-conscious minds tell them to act.
While what's good for the goose may be good for the gander, but humans are not geese. There are foods that are delicious to some but inedible to others; dairy products are an excellent example of that., and there are other foods that can even be deadly to some people, like peanuts.

So where is this going? It is my opinion that that it is usually a waste of breath to tell others how to live their lives. It's a different matter when one controls the local religion, and the religion is followed by everyone. But that is not how it is in the U.S.A. or in the EU, but there some countries where the majority is unwilling to accept people who are not of their norm. Europe is different, because there were the wars of religion in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries where many people were slaughtered for religions reasons, for no good reason. The shared experience of those wars brought about the Enlightenment, which includes classical liberalism, which is the willingness to let people live as they wish.

This blog post has reminded me why I favor classical liberalism. I do not want to prevent anyone from doing and believing as he or she wishes. Then there's the matter of "I may disagree what what you say, but I'll defend to my death your right to say it", but if you start trying to force your beliefs on others, then my defense of you will stop.

If I were looking for trouble, then I would go into pointing out the problems with monotheism or demonstrating the superiority of polytheism, but I am not looking for trouble, and those matters are self-evident.